About a year ago, I posted about an Apple repair where it was not covered by Applecare. We had a relatively new Intel iMac begin to malfunction severely outside of the one year warranty. It was a helpless feeling to know that fixing it would require spending some money and time at an Apple store to remedy the situation.
Well, it was a gamble and in that case it didn’t work out. Recently, I had the opposite experience. My own personal iMac at home began to malfunction in a similar fashion. It was fine one day, and unusable the next. The hard drive decided it was retiring from active service.
The first thing I did – after taking a deep breath – was to check if my iMac was covered by Applecare. I couldn’t remember for sure. I had to scramble to find my paperwork (computer stuff is filed together at home). What a pleasant surprise it was to discover that not only did I get Applecare with the iMac, but I was still covered for it!
Yes, my important files had all been backed up. OK, this all softened the blow considerably. It was merely a repair and recover operation. The only thing I would be out of was the time spent in transporting the iMac to and from the store, plus the downtime without it.
The other annoying thing was the timing of it all. My iMac died during the Christmas holiday week run-up. Not a good time to have to lug a computer to a store that is mobbed by hundreds of last minute gift giving Apple shopper! So I waited a few extra days before making my Genius Bar appointment. Finally, I set up the time for the appointment online – a really nice way to do it, I might add. What happened next? We got a snowstorm the day of the appointment! Oy!
Well, you gotta do what you gotta do. I drove to the store (slowly) and got my iMac into the hands of a very undertanding and empathizing “Genius”. The verdict was as I predicted – it needed a new drive. No idea why it failed, and in such a short time frame. Usually there is a bit of warning before these things go. Oh well.
The Genius told me that a replacement drive would need to be ordered. Hmmmm…. Who didn’t know that was going to happen. Whatever. I told the genius to call me when it’s ready. A week later, it was. I made the trek back – this time sans snow.
Got the iMac home and plugged it in. It felt good to have it back after a long period without it. It booted up fine and I proceeded to bring the freshly installed OS X back up to the current patch levels. Time consuming but it didn’t bother me too much – it was a good exercise. However, the problem was in getting everything recovered from my backup – documents, apps, etc.
This is the part that I really DON’T like doing. In general, I prefer to restore files manually, which is what I did here. It takes hours, but at least I can take my time and make sure things are working. I ran into problems with both Adobe and Quark programs since both have the nefarious “activation” scheme. Any time there is a significant hardware change to your setup, those applications will instantly fail to launch because of “activation failure”. It took some tinkering and I was forced to reinstall those apps from scratch and reactivate. VERY annoying since the apps had been transferred just fine. It was the activation file(s) that had the problem. Not sure how they expect you to properly deactivate your software when the computer has died and before you replace the drive, but that’s how it is.
After that was done, I restored the rest of my files and tested everything. A few niggling issues remained. I had to look up some serial numbers and got stuff functioning again. I’ve done this many times before on many Macs, but I have no idea how the average user would be able to do all of that. Apple’s answer is to use their Time Machine backup system. Even so, restoring a computer using TM is not so simple, but it is geared toward the average person.
In short, this was a happy ending due to having Applecare. I got lucky this time around – definitely. I might just have to consider AC as necessity from now on, pricy though it is. I’ll write about my brand new backup “system” in a followup post to come soon.
David says
Thanks. The theme is called CognoBlue. Minimal modifications to it.